This research attempts to illuminate the phonetic and phonological patterns and environments underlying disfluency in Japanese, English and Korean. The patterns and the environments may be able to give us a way to find the factor of speech disfluency. They may also show us a hint on the process of speech production of language specifics. To do this, the object for analysis focuses on a repetition style of disfluency. In the normal connected speech, both stuterers and nonstutterers often or sometimes produce this kind of repetition. So it's not difficult to pick them up as speech samples.Collecting good samples of speech disfluency was the first stage of the research. In Korea about 3500 stuttering samples and the background samples were picked up in the speeches at the meeting of the Korean stuttering self-help group. The next collecting samples would have been Chinese disfluency. But Sars prevented from getting Chinese samples.So the next stage was to analyze collected Korean samples
… Moreincluding nonstutterers' disfluency samples from TV talk show programs. Instead of Chinese samples. Indonesian nonstutterers' disfluency samples and the background samples were collected through 8-hours Indonesian TV talk show programs. But the way to get stutters' samples in Indonesian could not be found by the end of 2004.Therefore, only Korean disfluency produced by stutterers and nonstutterers can be analyzed and contrasted with the other languages, Japanese and English. It is organized into The Cross-Linguistic Study on Fluency Disorders. Analyzed total samples are about 19,000 including background samples. Japanese are English samples are from previous studies by the same author (Ujihira 2000, 2003).This analysis has revealed three salient characteristics of disfluency in adult speech : (i)Most of the disfluency appears at the word initial, (ii)The unit of repetition reflects the phonological unit (a constituent of CVC syllable : onset, mora, or syllable itself)). But considerable number of repetitions of each language breaks CVC syllables into CV and V. And the C-unit repetition in stuttterers' samples is more than that in nonstutterers'. (iii)From the viewpoint of a phonetic transition defect, the statistic analysis has revealed that the environments where disfluency occurs are remarkably different between stutterers and nonstutterers in Japanese, English, and Korean. The stops (Plosives) are trigger for disfluency in stutterers' speech. On the other hand the nasals draws disfluency in nonstutterers' speech. This result suggests that the stutterers' disfluency and the nonnstutterers' kind have different backgrounds, in other words different processes for production of disfluency, though both of the styles of disfluency are the same form. Less